Features I Like About CQ5 - Scaffolding

This is the second of my series of blog posts about features I like about CQ5. Here, I will point out some not so well known features of CQ5 and how to put them to use in your projects.

Scaffolding is a functionality to create structure-wise similar content based on a - well - old-fashioned form-based input screen. Boring, you might say, and definitely nothing any editor used to drag'n'drop fun would like to use. Especially, since swapping back and forth to scaffolding mode from the sidekick doesn't work properly if the content structure changed by e.g. adding new components or removing / re-adding the text-image. Still, if there's some casual user who just once in a while has to type in some news entry or blog post, that scaffold might work - sort of. But the scaffold is not much to talk about. Let's reconsider this.

What is scaffolding actually? Basically, it's form based editing of existing or new pages. The form is defined as a static dialog within the CMS. You can have a look at the example and the dialog definition in your CQ5.5 instance (links require running it on localhost:4502).

This scenario can be used not only for quickly creating structured content (and works quite well for that use case), but I also used the functionality of the scaffold to provide advanced functionality:

So there are some use cases which make the scaffolding quite interesting. One other thing is that the scaffold is extendable:

Did you use the scaffolding already? How did you use and extend it?